2023 Vol. 42. №1

One of the key ethical debates in Russian religious thought, initiated by Leo Tolstoy, concerned the question of nonresistance to evil by force. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of Kant’s ethics and philosophy of religion on the course of this debate and to determine the place and significance of the arguments and considerations expressed on this issue by Semyon Frank in the early and late periods (1908 and 1940s) of his work. To this end I reconstruct the general course of the debate, notably the positions and arguments of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Beginning with Tolstoy, Russ­ian thinkers introduced the original ethical content of the idea of nonresistance derived from the Gospel into the ethics of duty borrowed from Kant. The Tolstoy version of this idea was challenged mainly from two directions: from the Kantian grounding of the legitimacy of coercion and attempts to bring in styles of moral thinking other than the ethic of duty. Ilyin’s apolo­gia for the use of force in the struggle against evil prompted Russian émigré thinkers to take a closer look at Tolstoy’s ethical concept and pay attention to its positive content. On this basis Berdyaev and especially Frank create their version of the Christ-centered ethic of salvation which, in the perspective of “protecting the world against evil” includes the ethic of duty and links it with the possibility of using force, always a wrongful act, but one justified “in a situation of extreme need”.

The emergence of S. L. Frank’s philosophy cannot be understood without clarifying his attitude to Immanuel Kant. Following the early representatives of the theory of cognition of his time who undertook to understand Kant in order to go beyond him (W. Windelband) and their warning against turning Kant’s philosophy into a dogma and allowing for diverse interpretations of Kant (P. Natorp), Frank saw Kant not as a critic and “destroyer” of metaphysics, but as a thinker who laid the foundations of a new metaphysical synthesis. He set himself the task of “transforming” the Kantian philosophy into a new metaphysical system proceeding from the foundational principles of critical thinking. As a result, he managed to overcome the abstract concept of the human being characteristic of Neo-Kantians to put the concrete human in the absolute horizon of being at the focus of philosophical investigations. In his metaphysics anthropology begins to play a system-forming and meaning-forming role, and onto-epistemological reasoning is used as a methodology for revealing the specificities of the human being. Here, too, Frank follows Kant who in his Logic defined the question “What is man?” as the fundamental question of philosophy. Frank’s three books, The Object of Knowledge (1915), Man’s Soul (1915), and The Spiritual Foundations of Society (1930) demonstrate that a metaphysical interpretation of Kantian critique is possible and may turn out to be the foundation of raising and solving topical philosophical problems.

The widespread assessment of the early period of Semyon L. Frank’s work as being influenced by German Neo-Kantianism is in need of a critical scrutiny. There are several reasons why the Russian philosopher’s interest in Neo-Kantianism merits a closer look. First, two systemic theories belonging to different trends exerted a decisive influence on Russian philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: German Neo-Kantianism and Vladimir Solovyov’s school of all-unity. Second, Frank himself and the German Neo-Kantians considered Nicholas of Cusa to be one of their forerunners and pointed out the importance of his mathematical ideas for their mathematical studies. Thirdly and lastly, Frank paid particular attention, especially in his formative period as a philosopher, to the leading trend in the early twentieth century, namely German Neo-Kantianism, which led some students of his work to believe that German Neo-Kantianism played the decisive role in Frank’s abandonment of Marxism in favour of religious ontology. Frank’s fundamental disagreement with German Neo-Kantianism was expressed in his work The Object of Knowledge in which he criticised the Neo-Kantian concepts of number and time. Although Frank rightly points out the one-sidedness of the Neo-Kantian definition of number, most notably in the works of the Marburg philosopher Paul Natorp, on the whole his criticism of the Neo-Kantian concept of number and time as being different from his own is not entirely convincing. In my opinion, Frank’s attempt to explain the abstract concept of number through a still more abstract concept of all-unity was not crowned with success because he ignored the experience of Christian theology and the Trinity dogma as well as the profound thoughts of the Rev. Pavel Florensky on this topic.

Russian philosophy is “a sphere of conversation” in which thought is “divined”. It is a realm of search for “universal meaning” and “cultivation” of historical reality. Such a “conversation” around the work of Dostoyevsky took place in the 1920s among philosophers (including members of the Free Philosophical Association or Volfila in its abbreviated form). The theme takes on added significance at the hands of Ya. E. Golosovker and S. L. Frank whose intellectual affinity manifests itself today in the way they interpret Kantian motives in the work of Dostoyevsky. Reflecting on “the logic of imagination” Golosovker draws attention to the fact that the concrete-metaphysical method of seeing the world is not identical to the amphiboly of Kant’s reflexive concepts. He made it the central theme of his book, Dostoyevsky and Kant, immersing the philosophical component of the novel The Brothers Karamazov in the context of Kant’s antinomies. The later Frank took up the subject of Dostoyevsky’s worldview in response, as it were, to the discussion of the problem of cultural crisis at Volfila (including at meetings “In Memory of Dostoyevsky”). Following Yakov Golosovker, Andrey Bely, Aron Steinberg, Semyon Lurie and others, he continued the discussion of the crisis in its organised forms. In this context, too, Kant is a significant presence. For Frank, as for Golosovker, Dostoyevsky’s world view has a “concrete-metaphysical character”. They come to this conclusion reflecting on the problem of freedom as seen by Dostoyevsky who sought to overcome Kant’s antinomies.